The word 'critical" has three meanings which are dangerous, important, and disapproving. The purpose of this blog is to examine important or over-looked cultural, political, artistic, or historical issues of our time. Also, this blog is intended to be educational.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Little Known Ancient African Empires

The Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe (1220–1450)

The
civilization of Great Zimbabwe was one of the most significant civilizations
during the medieval period. Great Zimbabwe is extraordinary because of the
magnificent scale of its structures. Its most striking edifice, referred to as
the Great Enclosure, has walls as high as 36 feet extending approximately 820
feet, making it the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara Desert.

In the 1800s,
European explorers, imperialists and colonizers were stunned by Great
Zimbabwe’s grandeur and cunning workmanship, so they attributed the
architecture to Portuguese travelers, Arabs, Chinese, Persians, or even
biblical characters, such as King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

According to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, archaeological investigations conducted during
the first decades of the 20th century have dismissed those attributions and
confirmed both the antiquity of the site and its African origins. It was built
by the ancestors of the indigenous Shona people in the 11th century, long
before the first Europeans ever set foot in Zimbabwe.

The Ruins of Great Zimbabwe

Ancient Nubia (4500 B.C. – 500 A.D.)

Ancient Nubia, also known
as Kush, was a region along the Nile River, located in northern Sudan and
southern Egypt. It was home to some of Africa’s earliest kingdoms. Known for
rich deposits of gold, Nubia was a major trading port for luxury goods that
came from sub-Saharan Africa, such as incense, ivory, and ebony.

The first monarchy of
recorded history was established in Nubia. The Nubians were also known for
their exceptional archery skills that provided the military strength for their
rulers. Kings of Nubia ultimately conquered and ruled Egypt for about a
century. Monuments still stand—in modern Egypt and Sudan - at the sites where
Nubian rulers built cities, temples and royal pyramids.

In the 1800s, the Western
world’s interest in Nubia was awakened by the rediscovery of the ancient
empire’s monuments, which were reported almost simultaneously by individual British,
French and American explorers. Many of them found it difficult to credit
indigenous Africans for building such a civilization.

During the 1840s, German
Egyptologist, Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-1884) asserted confidently that the
Greek term “Ethiopian,” when referring to the ancient civilized people of Kush,
did not apply to “negroes,” but was used to describe reddish-skinned people
closely related to the Egyptians, who “belonged to the Caucasian race.”

Again, in 1852, when the
American diplomat Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) visited Sudan and gazed upon the
temple carvings of gods and rulers with clearly African features, he also found
it inconceivable that they could have been created by black-skinned Africans.
Rather, he asserted, echoing Lepsius, they must have been created by Egyptians
or immigrants from India or Arabia, or an “offshoot” of the white race.

The Ruins of Nubia

Carthage (813 B.C. – 146 B.C.)

Carthage was founded in the 9th century B.C. on the Gulf of Tunis. From
the 6th century onwards, it developed into a great trading empire covering much
of the Mediterranean and was home to a brilliant civilization. In the course of
the long Punic Wars, Carthage occupied some of Rome’s territories before
finally being destroyed by its rival in 146 B.C.

In his book,World’s Great Men of Color, Volume 1,
history scholar J.A. Rogers asserts, “The Carthaginians were descendants of the
Phoenicians, a Negroid people, and that in fact until the rise of the doctrine
of white superiority, Hannibal was traditionally known as a Black man.”

Today, many encyclopedias classify the Carthaginians as whites or
Semites, but ancient Greek and Roman eyewitness accounts paint a different
picture.The indigenous peoples of Carthage were called the Afers. Ancient
Roman poet Vergil in his poem “Moretum” speaks of a woman from the Afer
[Afar/Afra] race. He says of her: “And all her figure proves her native
land. Her hair was curly, thick her lips, and dark her color.”

InLibrary of History Book XX, Greek
historian Diodorus mentions a Greek lieutenant named Agathocles, who defeated a
people in the area of present-day Tunisia, who were the same hue as Ethiopians.

The eyewitness accounts are corroborated by physical anthropology. L.
Bertholon and E. Chantre, both well-noted French anthropologists, documented
their examination of skeletons throughout North Africa in all periods. They
note that the remains of both upper and lower class individuals of ancient
North Africa were representative of the Negroid race.

The Ruins of Carthage

Numidia (202 B.C. – 46 B.C.)

Numidia was
another great Black Berber-Libyan nation in northern Algeria during the time of
the Romans and Carthaginians. It began as a sovereign state, and later
alternated status between Roman province and Roman client state. It is
considered to be the first major state in the history of Algeria and the Berber
world.

Numidia has
also been classified by European and Arab historians as a Caucasian- or
Semetic-built civilization. However, in his book,The Destruction of Black Civilization,Chancellor Williams declared that
Libya was once so nearly all-Black that to be called a Libyan meant that one
was Black.

The Greek
historian Herodotus, writing about Libya in hisHistories (Book Four),
stated: “One thing I
can add about this country: so far as one knows, it is inhabited by four races,
and four only, of which two are indigenous and two are not. The indigenous
peoples are the Libyans and Ethiopians, the former occupying the northerly and
the latter the more southerly parts; the immigrants are the Phoenicians and the
Greeks.”

One of the
most famous Berber-Moors of the Roman times was Masinissa, the king of Numidia
(238-148 BCE), who assisted the Romans against the Carthaginians during the
Punic Wars.

The coin
depictions and statutes of King Masinissa confirm without doubt, that this
great Berber leader and king of the Moors was phenotypically a Black
African man with woolly hair (similar to the West African type). Syphax, king
of the Masaesylians in Numidia, a contemporary and great rival of King
Masinissa, was also depicted in his coinage as a phenotypically Black African.

The Ruins of Numidia

Axum (100 A.D. to 940 A.D.)

The Kingdom of Axum was a powerful Ethiopian-Eritrean empire, located in
northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. It developed its power by controlling the Red
Sea trade routes.

Axum was ruled by the “negus nagast,” the kings of kings. Under King
Ezana, Axum was the most powerful empire in northeast Africa and in 350 C.E.
sacked the Nubian Kingdom of Meroe.

In the latter part of the 4th century, Axum invaded the southern part of
the Arabian Penninsula and occupied Yemen from 335 to 370. At its height, Axum
included the surrounding Ethiopian highlands, Beja, Noba, Kasu, and Arabian
kingdoms Himyar and Sabar.

The Kingdom of Axum was prosperous from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. It was
contemporary with the Roman Empire and according to the Persian religious leader
Mani (April 14, 216 - 274) , the Axumite civilization was third
among the four greatest of the time, on par with Rome, Persia, and China.

A theory about the origins of Axum was that it was founded by
Semitic-speaking Sabaeans who crossed the Red Sea from South Arabia (modern
Yemen). However, scholars now agree that Sabaean influence was negligible
and kingdom was founded by indigenous Africans.